Developer blog: Freedom Friday innovation day at Queue-it

Queue-it has initiated a Freedom Friday day for in-house developers. As the name implies, the developers were able to work on a task of their own choosing for the day.

Whether it be finding out about new developments in current technologies, such as the .Net Platform, messaging bots, the phazer framework for game development, Docker, TypeScript or looking further into machine learning.

Each employee chose their own subject and was free to work on it throughout the day, however, they wished, creating their own guidelines. The only request was, that at the end of the day, their projects were explained in a 5-10 minute lightning talk. This enabled the sharing of knowledge and debate as well as inspiring new ways to bring more innovation into the workplace.

As it was only one day, time was limited, helping to push the boundaries of innovation and enabling the Queue-it developers to concentrate on only one thing, for the whole day. You can find out more about what Queue-it’s developers got up to and their thoughts on the day below.

Lightning talks – Day of developing for innovation

Message bus

Martin Larsen, who is the Director of Product at Queue-it, also enjoyed Free Friday. Martin worked on a server free message bus, using AWS to send messages without previously knowing the sender or receiver.

Multiplayer game that can be played inside the browser

When an end-user is placed in a queue, it can be frustrating. Frederik William’s idea stems from a love of gaming combined with a good customer experience for people waiting in a queue. The possibility of creating a game where end-users waiting in the queue can play each other, using the Phazer framework.

”It was nice to play with some technologies and tools that you never get to do in normal work hours”

Frederik Williams

Big data and machine learning

Alexander Yaremchuk worked on AWS machine learning and how big data analysis can be presented in a form that is easy to understand, with an interface that logically explains the data. Queue-it has just passed 1.5 billion users. Machine learning could help us prepare for even more end-users and predict outcomes for our customers in the future.

Docker

Morten Brix Pedersen investigated the Docker platform. It works on the Linux system or in Windows containers in the .Net framework. Docker helps to simplify infrastructure configurations, regardless of the application environment. This can, in turn, lead to increased productivity and encourage rapid deployment.

“I felt a really good vibe, seeing developers really being passionate about topics they are most interested in”

Morten Brix Pedersen

TypeScript

Mojtaba Sarooghi presented the new features of Typescript 2.1 and how it can improve readability and maintenance of queue-it client side code. He was mainly pointing to the ability to use async/await keyword and how Typescript 2.1 can transpile that to ECMAScript 3 and the developers discussed about making a plan for updating javascript stack to use a new version of Typescript.

What’s new in the .Net Platform

Salman Nazir had a look at what’s new in the .Net Platform, Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio Code, and C# 7.0. It is important to Queue-it that everyone is up to date with the tools being used. Salman was able to give the team an overview of what could be useful and relevant for Queue-it development in 2017.

“It was a good experience to get an overview of the new tools and technologies from Microsoft (For instance, What’s new in the .Net Platform, Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio Code, and C# 7.0) by going through the video recordings of Connect(); // 2016.”

Salman Nazir

Companies must innovate to keep ahead of the game. Queue-it is doing just that!

Would you like to join Queue-it? Check out our careers page and see if there’s something that catches your eye.